In a world where a blog is created every second does the world really need another blog? Well, it's got one.
An irregular set of postings, weaving an intricate pattern around a diverse set of subjects. Comment on culture, technology, politics and the occasional rant about life.
Alan ... in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Fear breeds fear. Fear binds people up. Fear closes people down. To conquer it, fear must be stood up to.

In the case of the Angulo family in Lower East Side Manhattan, a Peruvian father’s fear about the outside world and what might happen to his children if they step over the threshold of their shabby four bedroom apartment means that he has insisted that his six sons and one daughter grow up in an indoor seclusion. Describing drug dealing in the apartment block’s lift and killings in the neighbourhood, the father comments (without any sense of irony):

“It was a piece of jail outside.”

Most years the children left their flat just a handful of times – if at all – and were taught not to look at or engage with people they saw. Their mother’s allowance for home schooling has been the sole household income since their father’s other act of rebellion against society has been to not go out to work.

While cut off from real people, Dad has been feeding his kids a diet of VHS and DVD films. Like a family locked into Play Resource Warehouse, the children build brilliant cardboard props, replica costumes, type out scripts, learn off parts and film each other re-enacting elaborate scenes from their huge and varied library of cinema.

“Is this the end of the beginning?Or the beginning of the end?Losing control or are you winning?Is your life real or just pretend?”

Their father can’t see any alternative to staying indoors. But one son “can’t live with” or “get over” his father’s treatment and – taking inspiration from The Dark Knight – Mukunda goes for a walk.

A year after first tasting freedom, by chance filmmaker Crystal Moselle meets the six dark haired young men dressed in their striking black suits and dark shades – a cross between Reservoir Dogs and Blues Brothers – and her gentle film The Wolfpack captures what happens next.

Grainy home movie footage of their film re-enactments is cut in with scenes of day to day life captured over a couple of years inside the apartment. The story is at first told by the children, with their mother Susanne later letting down her guard, and finally a few underwhelming contributions from the father Oscar.

There’s little to admire about Oscar: a paranoid man who sometimes slaps his wife when their argue.

The boys are all strong characters, but Susanne is the figure in The Wolfpack that I’m most drawn to. She’s trapped in an abusive marriage – “probably more rules for me than for them” – but seems to have stayed to look after the children. The eldest child – Visnu – has a developmental disorder and “lives in her own world”.

While many formative years of proper socialisation have been stolen from the children, the six sons seem well equipped to engage with the real world … once they figure out how it differs from the movies. They’re thinkers, actors and film makers: bursting with creativity and musical talent. But there is less time remaining for Susanne – a former Mid West hippy – to catch up with her aging mother who until recently didn’t even know she had seven grandchildren. Susanne has been robbed the most.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Marie Jones' two-handed farcical morality play Fly Me To The Moon is back in Belfast, this time on the stage of the Lyric Theatre. Davy Magee is an older gentleman who is recovering from a stroke and lives on his own in a bungalow. His speech has been reduced to moans, and his mobility is poor. Loretta and Francis are two of his regular care workers.

Francis (played by Katie Tumelty) is quick to see money-making opportunities. She's harshly suspicious of her boyfriend, but proudly lauds her entrepreneurial son who swans round in a shiny suit selling dodgy DVDs. Loretta (Tara Lynne O'Neill) has a heart of gold. She goes the extra mile for her house-bound clients. And under her own roof, she displays a surprising amount of empathy for her husband, an unemployed bricklayer who has swapped his trowel for the TV remote and a phone to call into daytime gameshows.

After two years of changing Davy's sheets, taking him to the toilet, collecting his pension and putting his bets on at the bookies they've really left it too late to find out about his background, his loves and his life. But do they deserve the high regard with which Davy secretly holds these two angels of mercy?

Presented with the chance to make a small profit at the expense of a dead man, the pair begin to slip down a criminal slide with no way to arrest their descent. Every time Francis says "Just hear me out ..." Loretta's ethical instincts are piqued before being quickly overridden by real world problems that a few more quid in her purse would solve.

One ruse leads to another and the women's crisis multiplies: by four o'clock in the afternoon the two care workers should be wondering how soon they will be swapping their green work clothes for prison uniforms. While the colleagues normally get on like a house on fire, the stressed circumstances begin to stretch their relationship.

As well as setting up a situation of escalating deceit and an examination of legacy, Marie Jones' play sets the audience up to assess the financial and social pressures facing working class families with examples of claim culture, questioning the cost and value of a child going through grammar school and spotlighting an expectation culture that is so hard to fund.

Some of the Lyric audience giggled their way through every funny retort that ping ponged between the two talented actors that were so at ease with the script. Others failed to choke back their laughter at the most inappropriate moments. (And one punter emptied their packet of Skittles over the floor.)

The content is both humorous and disturbing. There's an extended moment of John Cleese Ministry of Silly Walks performed in a wheelchair that is simultaneously hilarious physical humour and uncomfortable to watch.

With Frank Sinatra covers playing in the auditorium before the show starts, and "There may be trouble ahead" bursting in so appropriately as the interval lights fade up, Davy's love of Ol' Blue Eyes will be passed on to you by the time you leave the theatre. The see-through set works well and the actors never cheat by looking at each other through the invisible walls.

As well as the signature production of Dancing at Lughnasa that’s running in the Lyric Theatre from 26 August to 27 September, the Philadelphia Belfast Here I Come half of the programme includes rehearsed readings; dancing on the new Lagan Weir footbridge, Lanark Way Peace Wall, Titanic Slipways, Giant’s Ring, and the City Hall; concerts; fine food and kite flying.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

A bomb is set to detonate while a world leader addresses a hall full of activists. This could be the storyline that drives a series of 24 or the next Spooks film. Except it is a true life story from November 1939 that forms the basis of the new film 13 Minutes (Elser).

Georg Elser (played by Christian Friedel) was a clock maker/furniture maker who had taken a job in an armament factory. He planted sticks of explosive and an intricate mechanical timer in a hollowed-out pillar to bring the roof down in the Munich hall in which Adolf Hitler was due to speak.

Due to a weather-induced change of travel plans, the Führer left 13 minutes before the blast. Miles away, Elser was caught acting suspiciously and linked to the explosion whenever a copy of the hall’s plans were found in his jacket pocket.

And so the Criminal Police and Gestapo began a gruesome game of searching for facts that never existed. If the Führer wanted to know who inspired the plot, he need only have looked in the mirror. Yet those who detained the clock-maker struggled to believe he had the means or the motive to carry off the attack alone.

Police chief: “We can’t get any more out of him than the truth.”
Gestapo chief: “We make the truth.”

The film’s sense of pace is plagued with flashbacks to fill out Elser’s social and workplace backstory (though it does slightly limit the amount of torture the audience has to endure). His friends see him as a coward, but he’s a quiet activist with a sense of justice, a sympathiser rather than a member of the Communist Party.

“If humanity dies, everything dies with it.”

An interesting side plot explores the Nazification of Elser’s home town and his growing intimacy with Elsa (Katharina Schüttler), a young mother who is beaten by her husband. They bond over dancing, but their permanent partnership is delayed by the zither-playing mechanical genius’ plans for destruction in Munich.

War was macho, and like the secretary who sits reading a book outside the interrogation room during the worst of Elser’s torture, the experiences of the German women featured in the film were shaped by men.

Elser believed he would prevent even greater bloodshed through his lethal deed. Asked by an interrogator what right he had to take the lives of the seven innocent people caught in the Munich blast, by a tragic coincidence Elser ended his days incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp.

Despite the precision of Elser’s bomb-detonating timepiece and the seriousness of the historical plot, 13 Minutes is tediously slow film. Long running at a shade under two hours, neither the action nor Oliver Hirschbiegel’s direction elevates 13 Minutes from being a worthy film to a great one.

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Life has thrown a lot at Stacey during her first 11 years. With her father already dead, she is fostered when her mother suddenly dies.

Her only close relative Uncle Will (played by Aidan Gillen - Love/Hate, Queer As Folk) is given temporary compassionate leave from prison to look after his niece.

“I don’t understand why we’re staying in a shitty caravan in the middle of nowhere?”

Rescuing a Belgian neighbour in a tight spot introduces Emilie (Erika Sainte) to the pair’s solitary confinement in the caravan park.

Will’s ambiguous answers about his past and present don’t cut the mustard with Stacey and threaten to damage their embryonic guardian/daughter relationship.

“You hurt my eyes with that outfit … you look like a freakin’ optical illusion!”

Lauren Kinsella plays the inquisitive, cheeky, spitting, burping and at times sweary Stacey. She’s still at the age where you wear t-shirts with upside down zebra patterns, but has a spirited soul and a blunt honesty that cuts through the deception she finds in the people around her.

The colour palette is green and beige, reflecting the mood of every character as well as the Irish midlands scenery. While some of the early cuts between camera angles are overly abrupt, the film soon settles into a temperate rhythm.

After seventy minutes or so the screen went blank and I wondered whether writer and director Mark Noonan was going to leave the audience to make up the rest of the story as we walked out of the dark cinema screen.

Instead another five minutes of script was acted out, moving time and the characters’ lives forward.

Coping, adapting, grieving but never crying out for pity: Stacey needs a second chance at being part of a family. Will’s parole isn’t permanent. Does he deserve another shot?